Why Guest-Posting Is Becoming a Leading Trend in 2015 Marketing Strategy

It is a year since Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, made an announcement that left many a SEO specialist shaken: if you are using guest posting, don’t. It is a thing of the past. It won’t do you any good anymore.

Later he edited this blogpost, stating that he didn’t mean to say that guest posting was useless in its entirety; only that it is no longer useful for SEO purposes. Which means that guest posting is far from dead – on the contrary, it is going to play a major role in 2015 marketing. Here is why.

1. Less Posting, More Trust

The interest to guest posting really took a plunge in the beginning of 2014, for a simple reason: the majority of those who used it primarily as a cheap means of link building (or at least those savvy enough) immediately opted out. Which means that the space is clear for those who are ready to use it for purely marketing reasons, there are less blog posts, they are more informative, their quality is higher, and the readers treat them more seriously.

2. Brand Awareness and Recognition

Guest posting is no use for link building anymore, it stopped to be a SEO tactic as such; but it is an excellent instrument for building up brand awareness and attracting traffic to your website. And not just any traffic, mind you – these will be the people who are interested in what you have to offer and are more likely to become customers. And as more and more businesses turn to white hat tactics of attracting customers due to the evolution of Google algorithms, so guest posting is going to grow as well.

3. Getting Reputation as a Specialist

If you guest post for publications having a good reputation in your industry, some of this reputation will inevitably rub off your name. People in the industry will get familiar with your name, it will become associated with expertise and authority. In other words, if you are well-known in your industry (or on the Internet in general), you will have easier time doing business in future.

4. Getting Subscribers to Newsletters

Since the main goal of guest posting is now to provide quality content and add real value to a blog, it will become an excellent tactic for building up your mail list – and adding subscribers to your mail list has always been one of the primary goals of any online marketer.

There, of course, will still be SEO marketers who will use guest posting in its old capacity of link builder. But they are going to be heavily penalized by Google, which inevitably will lead to their numbers dwindling – and this, in turn, will gradually remove the stigma of an unscrupulous marketing method from the whole thing. As a result, contrary to Mr. Cutts’s predictions of the last years, guest posting is not only alive and well – it is going to get a second wind and grow in importance in 2015.